Evaluating Environment in International Development: Contributing to National Results beyond Projects Juha I. Uitto, PhD Deputy Director, Evaluation Office United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Abstract Environmental evaluation is discussed in the context of national development in developing countries. It makes a case for the need of evaluation to move beyond evaluating individual interventions to assessing the contributions to sustainable development at the national and international levels. It highlights challenges relating to evaluating environment in national development, as well as aggregation and attribution of results from programs aimed for demonstration and policy influence. Keywords: evaluation, international development, sustainability, environment, attribution, results aggregation Introduction Questions related to environment and development remain topical today 20 years after the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit. Both national and international actors in governmental and nongovernmental fields, as well as in academia, are searching for insights into how sustainable development can be advanced and environmental concerns incorporated into the development agenda more effectively. There is an environment-poverty nexus at the heart of sustainable development that is still often neglected in development endeavours. Environment as a global public good tends to get short shrift, as in the short term it is seen as an externality and there are perceived trade-offs between economic development and environmental protection. While development programs often ignore the environment, environmental programs also tend to operate in isolation. Evaluation can play an important role in demonstrating results and analysing what works and why. However, to do so, evaluation must move beyond assessing individual interventions in isolation and contribute to the understanding of how environmental concerns can be better incorporated into development efforts in the national context. This article seeks to illustrate the potential impact of environmental evaluation on improving development efforts, while highlighting a number of challenges to be addressed. These challenges are partly specific to environmental program evaluation as such, but also pertain to efforts to evaluate environmental work beyond individual projects. Measuring the success of integration of environmental concerns into national development strategies faces challenges pertaining to aggregating and attributing results to programs whose goal is primarily demonstrating good practices and to influence policy. The first part of the article discusses the challenges pertaining to environmental evaluation in light of recent literature and the need to move to a higher level where evaluations are conducted against national development trends. It then presents two specific cases of drawing upon